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Schwab Charles 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $972m of the $10.72bn in the Schwab Charles plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.
The question on the ballot
As filed
The Schwab Charles 401(k) holds $10.72bn. Of the $972m we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.
SourceSchwab Charles’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing
| What the plan holds | Vehicle | Voting record | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-directed brokerage accounts | Brokerage window | Whatever the saver buys | $2.66bn |
| listed as “Schwab 1000 Index Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $2.41bn |
| Vanguard Institutional Total Bond Market Index Trust | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $972m |
| listed as “Schwab International Index Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $816m |
| listed as “Schwab Fundamental US Large Company Index Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $511m |
| Schwab 401(k) Equity Unit Fund | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $502m |
| Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $408m |
| listed as “Schwab Treasury Inflation Protected Securities Index Fund” | Bonds | No shares to vote | $407m |
| Vanguard Treasury Money Market Fund | Money-market fund | PUBLISHED | $396m |
| listed as “Schwab Fundamental US Small Company Index Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $313m |
| Spartan Small Cap Index Pool C | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $304m |
| listed as “Schwab Fundamental International Equity Index Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $262m |
The 12 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.
Why there is nothing to show
A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.
So the shares bought with Schwab Charles employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Schwab Charles; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.
What you can do
Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.
See how funds that do publish voted →
CoverageWe classified 41.4% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.
Other employer plans
The largest employer plans on the site, and a few more. Each page shows what the plan’s funds did with the shares its savers paid for.